Posts tagged “Jane Echelman”

Part of the day was done and there was still more to go…time card punched and waiting again…waiting again and again to punch back in and head up-town…waiting and thinking and knowing how to spend hours, not wanting to kill time and risk injuring eternity, but I was miles from home and miles from anywhere, and waiting to surround myself against my greater will with sounds foreign and people matching, piercing needles and veins on men and men, watching the sun go slowly down against a city-horizon of brick and stone and palms rising from urban desert sands with pigeons bobbing across asphalt driveways, with vagrant men sleeping and waking and running with wringing hands across the greenbelt, teens riding skateboards in the library parking lot, and paint ghosted onto walls random and intentional, messages wrought like iron in the workman artist’s hands. There was no south shore of a great and salted lake, but the sky and its clouds looked the same and gathered me in and drew me up and lost me in the white and blue similar heaven that was reflected in sky-scraper windows that bend in a lens as airplanes rode through a magical net.

Tamara had done a piece called Net Art and brought a random thought closer to fruition…inspiring night-time images of a familiar place, a bit of string and cable launched into the realm above a city park where black men and brown sat lounging in silver metal chairs with legs crossed and sun-glass-ed eyes open or closed in their tilted heads appearing to see what I saw and being Okay with just seeing it; it was just a thing that was up there, a thing that caught my eye in passing a light-rail platform with curves and lines of its own, riding ground level out and away from that city-center into the beyond.

My camera does’t like the night-time and my processing kit doesn’t straighten buildings, but it…the camera, does allow me to lie in the middle of the grassy park in my work clothes while I point it skyward and imagine that I know what I’m doing, looking through some other lens, some other set of eyes that ride atop words and desire to find and fill and consume and possess, to express, to show, to manifest ideas in a tangible form of ink dots or binary wonders.

You can learn more about this bit of wonderfulness by clicking on these words and flying through space and time to the artist’s web page. If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend watching the two videos…the second one shows the construction/assembly in a time-lapse format.